A View From The Coop:
Growing up, we’re taught various “rules” by our parents, family, friends, or any significant people in our individual lives about how to live and get along with others.
Growing up, we’re taught various “rules” by our parents, family, friends, or any significant people in our individual lives about how to live and get along with others.
Don’t look. Don’t point. Don’t judge.
Yet we all do it. It’s not that I think it’s right or wrong, I just think it’s human nature to crave relationships, even with strangers. It may not seem polite, but honestly, there’s an element in all of us to be naturally curious about other people. I mean, if you are wearing a cotton candy colored frock with a rainbow wig in Wal-Mart, chances are, you want some kind of attention. Or validation.
Perhaps it is more amplified now that most of us are figuratively and literally putting ourselves “out there” in social media tools such as Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr.
Is there a difference between being nosy and being naturally curious? Is there an element of voyeurism that is considered “acceptable” these days?
These may seem like odd questions. But myself and Dee, co-author of this blog, were talking about experiments in social media, mostly to see how many people would respond to a simple “relationship status” update. However, this experiment (to be headed by Dee) was cancelled because, well, I basically lived it.
A few months ago, I got married. The funny thing was, it was sort of an elopement, as very few people actually knew beforehand. We went to City Hall and believe it or not, telling our folks was the easy part. How to inform people we considered our “friends” on Facebook (who constitute those we consider family, friends, and acquaintances purely on Facebook shared interests) was the hard part.
See, it occurred to me that while no topic is considered off limits or taboo to me, on networks like Facebook it’s hard to be truly “private.” No matter how hard you try to keep your private life private, there is an element that you feel like you sort of owe an explanation. Well, forgive me for wanting to keep my relationship to ourselves and special for as long as we could. Needless to say, when we changed our relationship status to “married,” our virtual lives blew up. And not in a bad way, either, but still, when it all died down, it really wasn’t that bad.
I should not have been surprised though. After all, about a year prior, I had a friend who simply changed her relationship status from “single” to not being on her Info page at all. Within minutes, a bunch of people had commented, wondering what the occasion was. Well, my friend (a friend I had made the old-fashioned way, THEN became Facebook buddies) simply said she didn’t want to be reminded of her single life.
Which brings me to why Dee and I are constructing this post today. See, Dee and I have a unique relationship. We connected because of a shared interest (baseball, if you must know) but it turns out we were kindred spirits -- sistas from another mista, as I like to call us. We were discussing Facebook fallout, and it led to Dee calling some folks “nosy,” while I believe them to be “curious.”
We share some aspects of our lives on these media forms, albeit it’s at our own limitation. If we change our relationship status to single, to married, to divorced or even just take it down, wouldn’t it be hard to keep that business part of ourselves away from those we communicate with on Facebook?
It’s really questioned the limits on what relationships are. There is a fine line between nosiness and natural curiosity…there is also getting to be a fine line between virtual and reality relationships. For me personally, I find there are several people I care deeply about, but I may have met once or twice in my life. And you know with the advent of “Unfriend Day” in the media, many virtual and real feelings get hurt over a perceived slight because of mannerisms and suggested “tone.”
Yes, it’s an interesting social experiment to see virtual reality kick in on these forms of media. And yet, even if we get the reaction we expected, sometimes, it’s more than we bargained for. We still feel things as we used to, and virtual relationships add yet another complex layer to human interactions.
That's What Dee Said:
While some people are in fact naturally curious, you can't deny the fact that others are blatant busy-bodies. And for that reason, I find no need to wait for an official/unofficial National Unfriend Day to get rid of the dead weight. However, because of mistakes I made in the past -- one that almost cost me this moment right here and now -- I have to be careful and really think before I act when it comes to hitting that delete button!
The difference between curious and nosy is quite easy to explain. Curious is just that -- curious. It's not obvious and there is usually a sense of sincerity behind the inquiries of the person. Nosy is when someone comes out of the woodworks when you have something big going on, and not necessarily something good either. At least this has been my experience. But for others, including Coop, it may not be the case, in which case you start to wonder if it's not you causing your own privacy issues.
It's unfortunate that along with the things that Coop mentioned, we aren't all also taught to have respect for other people's privacy. Behind the computer screen, we don't know what someone is really thinking or saying, and that allows people to be cowards, where they may not be directly to one's face. We have to use covers, such as "lol" and "lmao" to make something harsh seem, well, not so harsh, but also get our point across at the same time.
My mother always told me "If you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all." More people, including myself, should listen to my mother.
Coop and I indeed have a special relationship. Our love of baseball (particularly, the Mets) and blogging brought us together, but our friendship has kept us together. And it grows more and more every day. Both being only children, we have definitely become the sisters we never had.
Coop has over 500 friends on Facebook. I have 71. Neither of us is right or wrong in the way we choose to conduct our online/social media business. But I found myself creating lists specifying who can or can't see certain information about me on Facebook. Then I thought, if I have to do that, why am I even friends with these people? If I have to "hide" information from someone because it's "too personal for them to see", then what is the point?
I started knocking off names left and right. I could easily have 500 people on my friends list today, but would they all really be "friends"?
I even "unliked" a ton of pages because I didn't want to be connected in any way to people I did not know and/or trust with my personal information. After all, behind each and every page is a real live person.
The truth is, while I enjoy the social media part of life, I don't need something like Facebook to keep in touch with the people I want to keep in touch with. And while Facebook certainly enhances the experience of my relationships, it sometimes restricts them as well.
Social media sites are a great way to keep in touch with friends and family and are excellent networking tools if you are in "the business". But how much is too much information to be shared?
Take Foursquare, for example. I use it occasionally. But is it really that important that all of Facebook knows where I am at any given time? Plus, is it really smart to announce when my home is unoccupied?
Sometimes I think people try too hard to maintain relationships online. But the ones who do may also be trying to fill a void in their "real world". For some, it's all they have.
That's What Dee Said:
While some people are in fact naturally curious, you can't deny the fact that others are blatant busy-bodies. And for that reason, I find no need to wait for an official/unofficial National Unfriend Day to get rid of the dead weight. However, because of mistakes I made in the past -- one that almost cost me this moment right here and now -- I have to be careful and really think before I act when it comes to hitting that delete button!
The difference between curious and nosy is quite easy to explain. Curious is just that -- curious. It's not obvious and there is usually a sense of sincerity behind the inquiries of the person. Nosy is when someone comes out of the woodworks when you have something big going on, and not necessarily something good either. At least this has been my experience. But for others, including Coop, it may not be the case, in which case you start to wonder if it's not you causing your own privacy issues.
It's unfortunate that along with the things that Coop mentioned, we aren't all also taught to have respect for other people's privacy. Behind the computer screen, we don't know what someone is really thinking or saying, and that allows people to be cowards, where they may not be directly to one's face. We have to use covers, such as "lol" and "lmao" to make something harsh seem, well, not so harsh, but also get our point across at the same time.
My mother always told me "If you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all." More people, including myself, should listen to my mother.
Coop and I indeed have a special relationship. Our love of baseball (particularly, the Mets) and blogging brought us together, but our friendship has kept us together. And it grows more and more every day. Both being only children, we have definitely become the sisters we never had.
Coop has over 500 friends on Facebook. I have 71. Neither of us is right or wrong in the way we choose to conduct our online/social media business. But I found myself creating lists specifying who can or can't see certain information about me on Facebook. Then I thought, if I have to do that, why am I even friends with these people? If I have to "hide" information from someone because it's "too personal for them to see", then what is the point?
I started knocking off names left and right. I could easily have 500 people on my friends list today, but would they all really be "friends"?
I even "unliked" a ton of pages because I didn't want to be connected in any way to people I did not know and/or trust with my personal information. After all, behind each and every page is a real live person.
The truth is, while I enjoy the social media part of life, I don't need something like Facebook to keep in touch with the people I want to keep in touch with. And while Facebook certainly enhances the experience of my relationships, it sometimes restricts them as well.
Social media sites are a great way to keep in touch with friends and family and are excellent networking tools if you are in "the business". But how much is too much information to be shared?
Take Foursquare, for example. I use it occasionally. But is it really that important that all of Facebook knows where I am at any given time? Plus, is it really smart to announce when my home is unoccupied?
Sometimes I think people try too hard to maintain relationships online. But the ones who do may also be trying to fill a void in their "real world". For some, it's all they have.
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